A major complaint about Google's Chrome web browser has been that so far, it is still not available on anything other than Windows. Google promised to deliver Chrome to Mac OS X and Linux as well, but as it turns out, this is a little harder than they anticipated, Ben Goodger, Google's Chrome interface lead, has explained in an email. It has also been revealed what toolkit the Linux version of Chrome will use: Gtk+.

Whether normal users care or not is debatable. All the mac users at work use Firefox because it's a better browser than Safari, they don't notice, much less care about any small differences in the UI. When apple can get away with all their different themes and styles, the experience isn't nearly as consistent as some people like to think. That said, I have no experience with Qt apps on a Mac, so I don't know the extent of the differences.

It's like Java - sure you can make a working cross platform app, but it will be hated by many users because it feels so wrong.

There's a huge difference between Java and Qt though. Java doesn't even bother trying to be native. It just looks awful on every platform.

Google have done the right thing for Chrome -> the back-end is cross platform C/C++, the front end will be 'native' on each platform.

I still think that's a mistake. Look at Skype for example. They use Delphi on windows, Cocoa on Mac, and Qt on Linux. Their Windows client obviously and rightfully receives the most attention, but because their GUIs are completely different, this means that their Mac and especially linux clients lag far behind. The interface is wildly different on the new 4.0 release for Windows than anywhere else. The other clients and languishing and just randomly integrate some features when the Mac/Linux teams have time.

So what's the final situation? Three GUIs that are so fundamentally different that they might as well be different apps. Massive development effort as evidenced by the fact that the other platform teams can't keep up to windows.

If they would have used something like Qt, the windows client would be just as advanced, and the Linux/Mac clients would be up to par. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a full featured Mac client with a couple inconsistencies than a crappy neglected client that lags behind what Windows gets.